Q: A Novel (12 page)

Slowly, my blood pressure rises.

The question
I
would like
to put to the table is why daughters have such unshakable confidence in their fathers. History is my domain, and while it cannot explain this phenomenon, it can offer stunning examples, none more spectacular and perplexing than Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Rodrigo Borgia, better known as Pope Alexander VI. Rodrigo is widely suspected of having acquired the papacy by simony and, once pope, to have littered the church’s offices with nepotism, lived the most secular and salacious of lives, and hosted within the walls of the Vatican wild, extravagant parties where incest and poisonings were de rigueur. He left Lucrezia’s upbringing to a cousin, engaging himself in her life only to arrange a series of marriages, each to support his own political ambitions. When the union no longer supported these ambitions, he often had the inconvenient spouse killed, sometimes at one of his infamous affairs, all regardless of his daughter’s feelings. Yet upon his death, Lucrezia sobbed uncontrollably and told the town crier, “He was a doting father, and threw the grandest of parties.”

Even Nazis have little girls who love their daddies. Heinrich Himmler’s daughter, Gudrun, now married to an Israeli journalist named Burwitz, remembers her father fondly. “Whatever is said about my Papi, whatever is written or shall be written in the future about him—he was my father, the best father I could have and I loved him and still love him.”

Myron Haines, however,
has a different question. “What is the justification for eminent domain?” he asks. “Where does it even come from?”

Here, Harvard Fernthrop rises from his chair, fixes his tweed jacket and bow tie, and clears his throat. “Many years ago . . .” he says, then surveys the table, and then sits back down. May pats him on his hand.

“Very nice, dear,” she says. Professor Fernthrop appears pleased.

“They have it all over the universe,” says Herm Alouise, by way of background. “I remember seeing a news report about a man named Dent whose house was condemned by eminent domain to make way for a bypass. He was lying in front of the bulldozers to keep them from demolishing his home when this alien comes and tells him that Earth itself has been condemned and is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.”

“That’s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
,” says Shep Hemsley.

“Yes, yes,” says Alouise, between bites. “Now that I think about it, it was in fact a theatrical performance and not a news program.”

John Deveril appears to have a special disdain for Herm Alouise, and his deathly stare silences the stage star.

This is too
bad, because John Deveril has much to learn from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide
. In addition to containing a thoughtful lamentation on the uses and abuses of eminent domain, Douglas Adams’s novel offers a definitive answer to the meaning of life. This is the product of a supercomputer named Deep Thought, designed by a race of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings, which after seven and a half million years of calculation, arrives at the conclusion: forty-two. The aliens are moderately satisfied with the answer but feel they have asked the wrong question. To formulate the ideal inquiry, they construct a second supercomputer, best known as the planet Earth. The timing of Earth’s destruction is particularly unfortunate, one might say ironic, because the program, which has been running for ten million years, is only five minutes away from finally calculating the question when the bulldozers hit.

Though it was a novel, Adams aficionados and armchair philosophers alike have speculated whether the author may have been onto something. Many have found meaning in the number’s binary representation, and its point value in Scrabble, and its significance to Tibetan monks. For his part, Adams dismissed all of this speculation as nonsense. He says he came up with the number while staring out the window into his garden. But the value of the answer cannot be overstated. As with any great exploration, and life is nothing if not this, it is important to have a place to start.

Returning to the subject
of eminent domain, Kristen Topper says, “I think it started with the British.” She turns to me for my expertise.

“It’s true,” I say. “William the Conqueror used eminent domain to seize almost all of the land in England. Later, the Magna Carta required that the crown pay compensation for the takings.”

Myron Haines shakes his head vigorously. “That’s not what I’m really asking. I don’t just mean to ask how it came into existence historically. I mean what’s the policy justification for it? Why do we still have it?”

Kristen Topper has nothing to say on this issue, and Professor Fernthrop, who is building a sweet potato relief of the Parthenon, does not appear moved to answer this question. One by one, the dinner guests look to their food, making clear they have no insight to offer, and thus it falls to John Deveril to offer a defense.

“It couldn’t be more obvious,” he says. “It’s about progress. The justification is the progress of society.”

My blood pressure rises further still. I envision a cartoonish gauge bubbling up to the point of bursting.

Myron Haines puts down his fork. “What does that mean, John? What is progress?”

“It’s the improvement of society,” John says. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“Surely you don’t mean to say that clearing the local hardware store to make way for condominiums or destroying an urban garden to put up another skyscraper represents progress?”

“No, of course not,” John replies. “But just because the government gets it wrong sometimes doesn’t mean that the idea is inherently flawed. You’re forgetting all the things that eminent domain helped make possible. Every highway, bridge, and tunnel in this country was built through the use of eminent domain. That surely represents progress.”

“I don’t know,” Myron says. “It doesn’t seem so obvious to me that highways and bridges make our lives better.”

“Well, that’s just idiotic,” John says, quieting the table. The resulting silence is not the product of people wanting for what to say. I, for one, would like to give John Deveril a piece of my mind for expressing sympathy for his daughter one moment then defending eminent domain the next. I am sure others have firmly held convictions on the matter. But challenging John Deveril is a tall order in any setting and overwhelmingly daunting at his own dinner table. I imagine each of the other guests is similarly cowed, and for a moment it appears that John Deveril has vanquished them. But then, to the surprise of everyone in the room, the heretofore silent Tristan Handy picks up the mantle and sets in motion the final chain of events that change my life forever.

Chapter Twelve

T
ristan Handy seems out of time. He rises as he begins to address the table and speaks as if he were to the manner born. With one notable exception, he is dressed the part of an English gentleman. He is wearing a gray morning coat, complete with gilt buttons and ascot tie. The notable exception is that his clothes appear not to have been washed in several years. Not unrelatedly, perhaps, his body odor is quite pungent. When he rises, a noxious wave washes over the table, leading everyone to put down their food, with the single and notable exception of Herm, who is apparently impossible to deter.

“I am not so confident in the truth of your proposition, gentle host,” Tristan Handy says, as he thoughtfully runs his hand through his coarse whiskers. “With all due respect, Mr. Deveril, I do not think Mr. Haines’s point can be dismissed so easily. The notion of progress is fundamentally entwined with a conception of the good life, of what is better and what is worse. But is there any neutral measure by which one can measure the quality of a life? Is there anything we can say about a world with highways and bridges that is truly objective?”

“They let you get places faster,” John says. “That’s objective.”

Tristan smiles. “True enough,” he says. “But is getting someplace faster an end in itself ? You know, one night about twenty-four years ago this week, I was watching
Alice
on television when I developed a craving for the Chick-fil-A. Now I know what you’re thinking,
Alice
wasn’t worth the time of day in 1985. Well, I respectfully disagree. I would watch Mr. Vic Tabak and Mr. Marvin Kaplan install a dishwasher if they would allow me. They are two fine comedic actors. But that is not the point of the story. The point of the story is that I wanted the Chick-fil-A and they do not have so much as one such establishment north of the Mason-Dixon line. So I called my travel agent and began making arrangements to fly to Atlanta. Because if you are going to get the Chick-fil-A, you want to go to the original and not to one of these ‘franchisees.’ ” Tristan says this last word with particular derision.

“So there I am on the phone,” he continues, “booking my flight on Eastern Airlines, which was far and away the most reliable of the domestic carriers at the time, when I asked myself, why do I not just walk? It is a fine night outside, I said. Once I had the thought, I did not waste another minute. I did not even bother to change my clothes. I hung up the phone with the travel agent and began walking south in my waistcoat and PRO-Keds. Before you know it, fifteen hundred and seventy-three miles later, there I am in the Greenbrier Mall in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the greatest knuckleballer of all-time, Phil Niekro. You can keep Mr. Hoyt Wilhelm, thank you very much.”

“Well, I will be darned if that was not the sweetest-tasting sandwich I have ever had in my entire life.” He points his finger for emphasis. “If you are ever at the Chick-fil-A you make sure you get yourself the original chicken sandwich with the toasted buttered bun and pickle chips, not one of the new club sandwiches or the chicken strips. You want the original for sure. It is absolutely exquisite.”

“Do you have a point?” John asks impatiently.

“My gentle host, my point could not be more obvious. It is so obvious that you will soon wonder how you did not see it yourself. When I look back upon that experience, as wonderful as that sandwich was, it is not what I recall most fondly. What I remember most favorably is the walk itself. I remember the things I thought about, the places I saw, and, most of all, the people I met along the way. Many of these people, your gentle wife included, had me into their homes, and together we built friendships that have lasted until this day.”

“And your point?” John asks again.

“My point is merely that oftentimes the journey is the superior to the destination. Relatedly, that nothing can substitute for human interactions. One must acknowledge that the downside of all the freedom we possess is the disintegration of communities. Television, the Internet, easy travel have all changed the ways we connect to one another in society.”

“It’s true,” says Herman Alouise. “Almost no one goes to the theater anymore.”

“Receipts at the Pillow have been declining for years,” says Shep Hemsley.

“And at the BSO,” agrees Myron Haines.

Even Joan Deveril gets in on it. “Who cooks anymore?” she asks. “Everyone goes out to eat every night. It’s a dying art.”

“Not dying here,” says Kristen Topper.

“Thank heavens for that,” says Herm Alouise.

“Three cheers for the chef,” says Tristan Handy. He lifts his hand to his head, rolls it three times outward in a gesture of deference, and finally sits down.

Cries of “Hear, hear” follow, and the clinking of everyone’s glasses, with the single and notable exception of that belonging to John Deveril. “You would feel differently about it if you were trying to get to the hospital,” he says. “Say all you want about the decline of theater and dance and cooking, but if you were having a heart attack, you’d be grateful for the cell phone that calls nine-one-one, and for the government seizure of land that created the path for the highway that races help to you, and for the people like me who built the big, fancy hospital where they perform your angioplasty.”

“I’ll drink to that,” says Herm Alouise, who is deep into a pile of Joan’s andouille sausage stuffing. Another round of clinking follows, a toast in which everyone participates, with the single and notable exception of Tristan Handy.

When the revelries have subsided, Kristen Topper asks, “Do you disagree with this point, Mr. Handy?”

“I do not necessarily disagree,” Handy says. “But I would first note the overwhelming temptation for humans to believe that life is progressing toward some ideal. Take the evolution of the Coca-Cola bottle, for example. Our inclination is to say that it is getting
better
with time, progressing if you will, toward some artistic ideal. But the truth is, they are just different Coca-Cola bottles. The bottles are not functionally different. The aesthetic merit of the bottle is entirely a matter of subjective judgment. The very word ‘evolution’ contains an artificial notion of progress.”

“So you don’t believe in evolution,” John Deveril says disparagingly.

“I acknowledge that creatures change,” Handy says. “I acknowledge that they adapt to environmental stresses. But I reject that these adaptations are aimed at the perfection of a species. I deny the notion of progress contained within evolution. Darwin himself resisted the term, you know. It does not appear until the final page of
The Origin of Species
.”

“So humans are no better than monkeys?”

“People like to think differently, but they are no better than the creatures they meet in a menagerie.”

“What’s a menagerie?” John whispers to Joan, so low that only their immediate neighbors, Q and I, can hear.

Joan leans over. “He means a zoo,” she whispers back.

“Why doesn’t he just say ‘zoo’ then?”

“Tristan doesn’t use the letter
z
.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“He says it is not a thing of consequence,” Joan explains quietly. “And he only concerns himself with things of consequence.”

“Tell me
this
isn’t a fucking menagerie,” John says under his breath. “And tell him.”

“He doesn’t use contractions either,” Joan says.

John rolls his eyes then returns to Tristan Handy. “So you’re saying man is no better than the animals we find in a zoo.”

“Certainly not better in any objective sense. Humans are better adapted to life under certain favorable conditions. They are better than their primate brethren at mathematics and at opening cans. But they do not represent a step toward the perfection of the species. Evolution, if you will, has no direction.”

The argument agitates John Deveril. “You can’t deny that organisms are becoming larger and more complex with time.”

“I do deny it. Some organisms have become more complex. But unicellular eukaryotes have not grown any larger or more complex in eons. And if you start with a one-millimeter-long amoeba, what direction is there to go but up? For example, consider White Castle. Delicious onions, by the way—that is really the essence of its charm. Some people say it is the bun, and it is a fine bun, mind you, but the onions are what make it distinctive. No other fast food gives you freshly cooked onions.”

The blood is rising to John Deveril’s head. He appears ready to explode.

Handy continues. “Suppose a new corporation took over the management of White Castle. Years later we might go back and find bigger burgers and say this was evidence of progress, but what else could we expect? It is not as if they could get any smaller. There is only one direction in which we could see change.”

“Well, you certainly can’t deny that brains are getting bigger and smarter. That’s surely evidence of progress.”

“Again,
some
brains are getting bigger,” Handy says. “But first of all, a bigger brain does not necessarily work better. Consider the whale, for example: huge mammalian brain, but not especially smart by our definition. Secondly, brains often get smaller in response to environmental stresses. Some orangutans in Borneo have been developing smaller brains.
Homo floresiensis
is almost certainly an offshoot of humans that
evolved
smaller brains.”

“So you say it’s all just random?”

“The belief in the progress of evolution, like belief in free will and God, is a construction to help human beings avoid despair.” Handy emphasizes this last point with a turkey leg.

“It is part of the way that people make sense of existence,” he continues. “But they are all illusions. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.’

“Outstanding turkey,” he says finally, as he licks the bone clean.

Handy’s argument unsettles the guests, as does his smell, but on the whole they seem to find what he has to say engaging and thought provoking. I certainly do. His proposition has sent my literary mind racing in a new direction. I am also awed by Handy’s finesse of the word “protozoan.” John Deveril misses this or, if he caught it, is unimpressed. He is merely angered by Handy’s disquisition, angered to the point of aneurysm. He leans over to Joan and once again whispers, “So I am spending Thanksgiving having an argument with a homeless man.”

“You should be precise,” Joan says. “You’re
losing
an argument to a homeless man.”

Again, from a historical
perspective, John Deveril is wrong to dismiss the contributions of the homeless. Nine Grammy Award recipients, six Oscar winners, and one Nobel Prize honoree were homeless at one point or another in their lives. Some of the greatest of the homeless voluntarily choose their fate, as did Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, who believed that to achieve enlightenment one must lead an ascetic life. Some have their fate thrust upon them, as did Jesus, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harry Houdini. But all, like Charlie Chaplin, who said his days as a pauper informed each and every one of his characters, were forever transformed by the experience.

The Swedish poet Harry Martinson, the aforementioned winner of the Nobel Prize, regarded his time as a tramp as essential to his art. Martinson’s magnum opus is
Aniara
, a poem of science fiction, in which a spaceship containing eight thousand colonists, fleeing the toxic planet Earth for a new home on Mars, is forced to take evasive maneuvers to avoid an asteroid. The new trajectory propels the ship past the red planet and out of the solar system, leaving the refugees to drift through space for eternity. The fifty-year-old space epic is, on one level, a call to environmental action far ahead of its time. More deeply, it is about time and meaning. The crew of the ship tries to while away the endless days in every imaginable way—by observing astronomical phenomena, holding orgies, and reliving memories of their own lives—by conducting science experiments, engaging in brutal totalitarianism, and, surprisingly often, simply playing games with coins. Ultimately, though, they cannot face the emptiness outside and inside, and everyone, including their computer, succumbs to despair. The hopelessness overwhelms them when they understand that twenty years of travel has only brought them a few light-days away from Earth.

The poem: “A light-year is a grave.”

The poet: “You don’t understand time, can’t understand time, until you have spent a night without a home on the banks of the Riddarfjärden.”

It is very cold on the Riddarfjärden.

After a few moments
of rumination, Shep Hemsley says, “You make a series of interesting points, Mr. Handy. Your argument is compelling to say the least.”

“Great,” John Deveril mutters to his wife in his private voice. “Now the gay guy is in on it too.”

“He is not gay,” Joan whispers. “And it wouldn’t make any difference if he were.”

“Are you kidding me? He’s the stage manager for a dance company.”

“Behave, John.”

“He has had six helpings of the cranberry relish.”

“You stop. Why does this conversation matter to you so much anyway?” John shoots Joan a dirty look then turns to address the table in full voice. “Can we at least agree that modern life is a happier existence?”

“Here is an improvement of the question,” says Tristan Handy. “At least happiness is an objective, measurable criterion.”

“Thanks,” says John Deveril.

“But I am not certain that modern life is a happier existence.” Handy expands on this. “It is surely true that people live longer today, and get places faster,” he says, “but this does not necessarily mean they are happier. Are people happier today than they were, say, two, three, or five thousand years ago?”

“I think they are happy to live longer,” says Kristen Topper to murmurs of agreement.

“Yes,” says Shep Hemsley. “What was the life expectancy in ancient Greece?”

Here, Professor Harvard Fernthrop rises from his chair, straightens his tie, and says, “Many years ago . . .” Then he looks at each of the guests and sits back down. May pats him on the hand.